1,720,957 research outputs found
The Evolution of Food Security: Where Are We Now, Where Should We Go Next?
Food security is one of the most challenging topics globally; however, the concept of food security has taken on additional dimensions that are general and are less detailed. This study aims to identify the intellectual structure of food security research and the changes in this structure. This paper analyzed 3169 documents from the Web of Science database through a bibliometric review. A review of the published documents shows an increasing trend over the past 46 years. In accordance with co-occurrence analysis, 125 keywords were grouped into five clusters: food security and sustainable development; food security and socioeconomic factors; food security policy and governance; coping strategies for poverty, inequality, and hunger; and modern food security management. This study identifies four streams within food security research: sustainability and environmental, socioeconomic, cultural, and political factors. The paper concludes that even though food security might investigate many significant areas, other new dimensions should still be considered. Further gaps in the literature emerge that present avenues for future research directions. Reviewing indicators and techniques of food security assessment and identifying high-risk groups should be a priority
DEVELOPMENT OF A TRANSPARENT AND DEFORMABLE TWO DIMENSIONAL RADIOCHROMIC GEL DOSIMETER
Radiotherapy is used in many clinics to deliver a sufficient and uniform dose to the cancerous tumours while the dose to normal tissues is minimized. However, there is a possibility of missing the target volume due to patient set up/motion errors, or any fluctuation in treatment delivery. Therefore, accurate dose verification tools are essential to evaluate the delivered dose distribution of the designed treatment plan under realistic treatment conditions. Current research is focused on developing 3D dose verification tools to record the complex dose distributions for quality assurance purposes and the evaluation of new treatment techniques. New and novel materials and read-out techniques suitable for use in hospitals are desirable. The objective of this research is to fabricate a transparent radiochromic gel dosimeter that may be used as quality assurance tool. Also, the fabricated gel must be analyzed using a simple optical read-out technique. Gel dosimeters are gels that undergo some chemical changes upon irradiation as a function of absorbed dose. The absorbed dose may be recorded in three dimensions depending on the type of gel dosimeter. Radiochromic gels are dosimeters that change colour upon irradiation. A radiosensitive dye, leucomalachite green (LMG) is dissolved in a matrix material to record the dose distribution in 3D. LMG changes its colour upon irradiation, and has an absorbance band of 629nm. In this research two different matrix materials were investigated: poly (vinyl alcohol) and gelatin. PVA was studied as the primary agent due to its adjustable mechanical strength and high transparency. PVA has also been studied to have a low diffusion rate when it was used as the matrix material in Fricke gel dosimeters [41]. Even though PVA had all the desired characteristics, fabricating a PVA based radiochromic dosimeter was not successful. Consequently, gelatin was used as the matrix material to fabricate a gelatin-based radiochromic dosimeter. Using gelatin, highly transparent radiosensitive gels were successfully fabricated. The absorbencies of the irradiated gels were measured as a function of absorbed dose, using a 1D set up. After, the gels were formed into 5mm thick films and used as two-dimensional dose verification tools. The relationship between absorbance and absorbed dose for 1D measurement was obtained to be 0.00241± 0.00004 , and 0.0022 ± 0.00007 for 2D gels scaled to a thickness of 1 cm. In all of the experiments the absorbance-dose relationships were similar in slopes, but there was an offset between different batches. The offset was 20% between the different experiments. Moreover, there was less than 5% error associated with the physical set up; the major source of error was due to the production and handling of the mixture, possibly due to the effects of inconsistent heating and UV light exposure. The 2D gels were used to verify the dose distribution for the purpose of quality assurance. Six different complicated beams were delivered to the gels and their dose distributions were compared to their respective Pinnacle Calculated Planar (PCP) dose maps. The difference was found to be about 35% at worst; however, this error may be reduced by utilizing more sophisticated data processing methods. Nevertheless, the images were quite similar above 20Gy. Furthermore, the dose distributions recorded by the gels are qualitatively and quantitatively similar to the (PCP) dose map. Although the fabricated gel dosimeters show some promise as future tools for quality assurance purposes, they must go through many more stages of research to be used clinically.Master of Science (MSc
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
The present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
We provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
We conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
koamabayili/VECTRON-author-checklist: VECTRON author checklist
We have done our best to complete the author checklist relating to the use of animals in the hut study. Note that the objective for the hut study was to evaluate the IRS treatment applications for residual efficacy against Anopheles mosquitoes, including the local An. coluzzii mosquito population. Cows were only used to attract mosquitoes into the huts and no tests were carried out directly on the cows. The author checklist is intended for use with studies where experiments are carried out on animals, which is why we have had such difficulty in completing this for the hut study, as many of the questions do not relate to how the cows were used
Author-wise bibliometric analysis based on entropy.
Author-wise bibliometric analysis based on entropy.</p
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